From God's Secretaries

Jointness was the acknowledged virtue of the age. Most of the plays performed in Jacobean England were written by more than one writer. A joint translation, by a large number of people, consulting the original manuscripts in both Greek and Hebrew, but relying carefully on much of the work which the sixteenth-century translators had done, was completely concordant with the ideology of the time. Lack of jointness, either through an overweening individuality or through simple dissolution, a falling apart, was considered an overriding error and a sin. The age was stiff with an insistent individuality, an over-whelming demand for 'authorship', for being master of one's fate, for claiming an individual significance beyond the world and society in which you had your being. 'Every one vaunts himself,' Philip Stubbes the Puritan pamphleteer had wailed in The anatomie of abuses, 'crying with open mouth, I am a gentle-man, I am worshipful, I am honorable, I am noble, and I cannot tell what; my father was this, my father was that; I am come of this house and I come of that.' The jointness on which so many of the moralists of the time lay such emphasis was an attempt to mend the cracks which the eruptive egotism of the time was opening. It is the great and
tragic theme of King Lear, that selfhood and disunity, a natural urge in man, nevertheless destroy the life they aim to elevate. Jointness, by contrast, was slow and careful. It required consul-tation, the gradual application of principles, not their violent banging in. Although the evidence is a little uncertain, these were probably the years in which woodscrews, made of brass, with the thread on them hand-cut, were first used in the making of furniture. The chairs and joint-stools made with screws — as well as with the more conventional oak pegs — became, in sermon after sermon, a symbol of coherence and propriety, of jointness. `In reformations of great importance,' the church historian Thomas Fuller told his congregation, 'the violent driving in of the nail will either break the head or bow the point thereof, or rive and split that which should be fastened therewith. That may insensibly be screwed which may not be knocked into people. Fair and softly goeth far.' Fair and softly goeth far: the irenicon of the new translation was to be a joint product.
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Some Puritans maintained that the names of the great figures in the scriptures, all of which signify something — Adam meant `Red Earth', Timothy Tear-God' — should be translated. The Geneva Bible, which was an encyclopaedia of Calvinist thought, including maps and diagrams, had a list of those meanings at the back and, in imitation of those signifying names, Puritans, particularly in their heartlands of Northamptonshire and the Sussex Weald, had taken to naming their children after moral qualities. Ben Jonson included characters called Tribulation Wholesome, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and Win-the-fight Littlewit in The Alchemist (16 io) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Ban-croft himself had written about the absurdity of calling your children 'The Lord-is-near, More-trial, Reformation, More-fruit, Dust and many other such-like'. These were not invented. Puritan children at Warbleton in Sussex, the heartland of the practice, laboured under the names of Eschew-evil, Lament, No-merit, Sorry-for-sin, Learn-wisdom, Faint-not, Give-thanks and, the most popular, Sin-deny, which was landed on ten children baptised in the parish between 1586 and 1596. One family, the children of the curate Thomas Hely, would have been introduced by their proud father as Much-mercy Hely, Increased Hely, Sin-deny Hely, Fear-not Hely and sweet little Constance Hely. Bancroft, and this royal translation of the Bible, could give no credit to that half-mad denial of tradition. It was one that trav-elled to America with the Pilgrim Fathers. Among William Brewster's own children, landing at Plymouth Rock, were Fear, Love, Patience and Wrestling Brewster. It is one of the ironies of America's relationship to the King James Bible that, at the very beginning of the Massachusetts colony, the thinking of the colonists and of the Bible, which would in time come to seem
like their national text too, could not have been further apart. The Pilgrim Fathers would undoubtedly have taken the Geneva Bible with them.
Bancroft, and almost certainly the king, was not prepared to give any ground in the language of the translation to the Presbyterians (who denied any scriptural authority to bishops) or Separatists (who would in time call themselves Independents and then Congregationalists). This was one of the oldest nubs of Bible translation. William Tyndale in his great 1526 ground-breaking translation of the New Testament had translated ecclesia not as 'church' but as 'congregation' and presbyteros not as 'priest' but as 'senior' (which he later changed, under pressure from Thomas More, to 'elder', as being the more English word). The entire meaning of the Reformation hinges on these differences. A presbyter, an elder, has no ancient priestly significance; he is not the conduit of God's grace, he does not interfere with the direct relationship of each soul to God, nor, in Luther's famous phrase, with the priesthood of all believers. If presbyter is what the scripture says, what need is there of bishops and archbishops? And if ecclesia means not church but congregation, what relevance to God can there be in the elaborate and expensive superstructure of an established church and the grotesque indulgences of its officers? Was the true meaning of the word ecclesia not a reproach to the habits of even such a godly bishop as Thomas Morton who when travelling by coach 'had always some choice or useful book, which he either read himself, or else caused a Chaplaine as his Amanuensis to reade unto him, who attended on his Journeying'? Did ecclesia really mean old men riding about the countryside as comfortably as if in a first-class railway compart-ment? And monopolising the funds of the true church to do so? It was to avoid questions of that kind, redolent of the profound political and social subversiveness which lies within the Reformation, that the old words had to be kept. 4. When a word bath divers Significatons, that to be kept wch bath ben most commonly used by the most of the ancient Fathers being agreeable to the proprietie of ye place and the analogie of fayth.
The Church of England, like the Church of Rome, but unlike the more fully reformed churches of Europe, relied for its under-standing of the often complex texts of scripture on the ancient inherited traditions of Christianity, the statements and resolutions of the councils of the early church and the great body of patristic scholarship, in particular those church fathers — above all Jerome, St John Chrysostom, Augustine and Origen — of whom sixteenth-century English scholars, including several of the Translators, had made a particular study. This instruction is part of that widespread Reformation phenomenon, the search for primitive authenticity, for avoiding all hint of dreaded 'inno-vation', looking for true meaning in the most ancient and hence the most reliable texts. This too is a mark of the modern: a historical consciousness and a sense that the world now has fallen away from the more perfect state in which it once existed. 5. The Division of the Chapters to be altered either not at all, or as little as may be if necessity soe requier. The king seals his first point: the new Bible is to look and feel as much as possible like the old.
Having established the grounds of continuity, the Rules then move on to deal with the question of commentary and expla-nation. The sixth instruction, repeating James's outburst at Hampton Court, was in many ways the richest:
Noe marginal notes att all to be affixed, but only for ye explanation of ye Hebrew or Greeke Words, which cannot with-out some circumlocution soe breifly and fitly be expressed in ye Text.
A full exploration of this fascinating rule must wait until later — so much flows from it — but its bones are clear. The kind of notes with which the Geneva Bible was littered, so violently disliked by James, were not to be admitted. But the crucial point is this: there were to be no marginal notes 'au all', not even those which might conform to the ideology of the established Jacobean church. The text, as all good Protestants might require, was to be presented clean and sufficient of itself, except where the actual words of the original were so opaque that a 'circum-locution' might not explain them within the text. 'Circum-locution' did not mean then quite what it means now. Thomas Wilson in The ante of rhetorique, published in 1553 and in use throughout the sixteenth century, had described circumlocution as 'a large description either to sett forth a thyng more gorgeous-lie, or else to hyde it'. The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different mean-ings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the transla-tion, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text. This single rule lies behind the feeling which the King James Bible has always given its readers that the words are somehow extra-ordinarily freighted, with a richness which few other texts have ever equalled.

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Yet further `Ancient and Grave Divines, in either of the Universities', were to ensure that passages and references translated one way in the Old Testament were translated concordantly in the New. There had been ferocious controversies throughout the sixteenth century over precisely this problem. Distressingly, in the New Testament, Christ and the apostles, when quoting from the Hebrew scriptures, tended to use not the original Hebrew texts them-selves but the Greek words of the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament made at Alexandria in about 130 sc. Often, even in the best texts, the words of the Septuagint do not faith-fully reproduce the meanings of the Hebrew scriptures. Could Christ and the apostles have been wrong? Could the omniscient God, in the form of Jesus, be ignorant of his own word? It was clear that the standard of scholarship among Christ's disciples was despicable. The Greek of the New Testament was coarse and clumsy, a steep descent from the heights of fifth-century Athenian elegance, 'countrified and simple' according to Erasmus, or apparently 'concocted', as Charles Bradlaugh, the Victorian atheist described the Gospels, 'by illiterate, half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum'. Paul garbled quotations from Isaiah, Mark muddled Isaiah with Malachi, Luke included the name of Canain in a genealogy which was not there in the Hebrew Genesis, Matthew left out three kings in his genealogy of Jesus, then misquoted both the Hebrew and the Septuagint before attributing something said by Zechariah to Jeremiah. In a text which was said to have been dictated by God, this was an agonising and difficult problem.